In the RMP there is an item of clothing (Sweet Temptations by lilflame) that is what I think is properly called a torpedo suit - it's a swimsuit with no waistband and a string back. In lilflame's version the string at the back follows the curve of V3's spine, which couldn't possibly happen, since the material has to be taut. In reality the costume makes a flying leap from the top of the natal cleft to the neck/shoulders. In Poser terms, this means the conforming item, as it goes from hip upwards past the abdomen to the chest and neck region, should properly be some distance away from the figure that it's conforming to. Is it possible to do this, or is "Sweet Temptations" the way it is because of a limit in the system Poser uses to conform items?

Attached Link: Example of suspenders fixed in post

Yeah, this is something I often see in clothing of this nature - also in stocking suspender straps and bikini or bra shoulder straps, for instance. Very irritating. I guess it has to do with the clothing also having body parts like thew figure and those parts following the figure in bends, as it has the same JP's. One solution is to use magnets to pull the strap away and try to make it fairly straight, but it never works perfectly. In fact, I usually solve this by rendering the figure both with and without the clothing, then putting the two together in PShop and adding the strap (which basically is a thick straight line) in post. About my example image: I never got around to fixing the other bad conforming clothing issue, the big shoulders - her top should 'hang' off her shoulders, hugging them, not look like balloons the way it does now. I should fix that :o( :] Fish

There are three ways (except for postwork)that I know of: using dynamic cloth, start with a scaled down figure and let him/her grow to normal size later in the animation. Or using no vertices between the start of the string/suspender and the end, which is very light on resources and works in all Poser versions, but is limited to strings/suspenders/straps that always should be straight. The third way is using morphs. Lots of morphs. A nightmare to pose well, and since the crosstalk bug has been eliminated in P5, a cloth creator should not rely on ERC. This is indeed a limitation of conforming clothing. Personally I prefer using dynamic cloth.

That is probablay a modeling choice made by the creator, to my knowledge there is no obligation to have a piece of clothing precisely following the contour of the body at zero position. It may be that when posing the mesh deforms somewhat but that is caused by the influence of the bone's blend zones across the different body parts. I have made puffy sleeves that in no way followed the natural shoulder shape, and Poser handled those quite well.

I thought of that, but puffy sleeves would not run across more than one body part, which might make a difference. The problem with using magnets as I see it is that it's easy to bend something that's straight, but rather hard to straighten something that's crooked.

smartprops.

um, but the front works. it hangs off the breasts and is taut till her crotch, or at least this appears to be true in the promos. so why couldn't the back work? there's probably reasons, i just wanted to point that out.

A lot depends on the pose of the character. If you pose the character hunched over, you'll see the cloth on her front behave exactly like the back string is behaving right now. If the cloth could behave really realistic, it would slide over her shoulders a bit when she arches her back or hunches over. That is fundamentally impossible with conforming clothing. Only dynamic cloth has a more or less realistic behavior, but it is much more difficult to control.

One thing to remember we are not dealing with fabric here, but with mathematics basically, Poser tries it's best, with conforming clothing, but it's just not programmed to know what to do with bra straps and such. It pulls polygons here and stretches them there across body groups, there is not much we can do about it, except carefully choose poses and camera angles, and do some postwork here and there. You can tweak joint parameters forever, but there is only so much you can accomplish.

That's exactly right. The mathematics of conforming clothing are pretty simple, that's why conforming clothes react very fast to changes in the pose of the character. But they are not physics based, and only work well for medium tight clothing like pants and T-shirts. They also work very good for semi-rigid clothing items like shoes and boots. Completely rigid clothing, like plate armor, is usually provided as conforming clothing, works pretty well, but smart props are probably the best way to do armor. Loose flowing cloth and stretching stuff like straps/suspenders etc are best served with a physics based approach. In Poser, that's dynamic cloth. It's far from perfect, there are some pretty strange glitches now and then, but as of right now it's the best approximation you can get. And of course, you can always use postwork.